2022: The year in graphics

Our mission as The Washington Post’s graphics team is to create impactful visual stories that are interesting, important and innovative. This has been our driving force for the hundreds of visual stories, interactives, maps, charts and many other storytelling formats the team has produced in 2022.

Thank you for spending this year with us.

1. Visualizing events as they happen

When news breaks, there are story angles that can’t be covered with text and images alone — when Russia was poised to invade Ukraine, when Queen Elizabeth II died, or when natural disasters threatened homes and lives. Our visual stories cover these events in a way that only graphics can.

2. Helping voters navigate and understand elections

Voting is one of the most important rights of a citizen, but also a responsibility. This year’s midterm elections, The Post’s graphics team dedicated itself to explaining the most important concepts and processes to voters and to offer clear and detailed information about the results. We even created a mini golf game that teaches you about gerrymandering in a way that nobody else has done.

3. Exploring stories close to home

There’s a saying in journalism that all news is local. Stories that might not seem so close to us actually can affect our houses, our schools, our football teams and even the money in our banks — and we covered them all.

4. Explaining the world around us

There are also stories that we might not pay enough attention to because they happen in different countries, to different people. But they, too, can end up touching us in one way or another.

5. Telling our readers more about themselves

But the stories that everyone cares about the most are often not the ones that happen to others, in a different corner of the world or even a few miles away, but the ones that affect us directly. Stories that help us make decisions about our daily lives: What behavior is best for my health? How will this new law affect me?

6. And getting delight from little joys along the way

Then there are all those other stories — the ones that sometimes aren’t in the news but hide small, delightful moments like “Is your name more common about people or dogs?” Or the ones that everybody talks about but nobody has told it to you in this way like “That’s a clear offside! But why?”